Resinous wood
Pine, resin, sandalwood and cedar — aromatic wood rather than plain wood, and a different thing from the wood band.
Resinous notes are separated from the general wood band because they behave differently: they are sharper, more volatile, more perfumed, and they come from aromatic compounds in the wood rather than from the woodiness itself. Pine and pine resin appear on smoked teas, where the source is literal, and on some aged material where it is not. Sandalwood is a standard descriptor for well-aged sheng and for some heavily roasted oolong. Cedar and cypress turn up occasionally. The band overlaps with camphor, which is also a volatile from aromatic wood, and the two are frequently described together on aged pu-erh.
Which sense this is
Aroma. Volatile compounds, smelled through the nose or retronasally while drinking. Nearly all descriptive tea vocabulary is here, including words people say they can taste.
Compound descriptor. A familiar thing used as shorthand for a mixture of sensations. Nobody detects 'chestnut' — they recognise it.
Where it comes from
- Processing step
Where the tea was smoked or dried over resinous pine, the source is direct. Lapsang Souchong's resin note and its smoke note have the same origin.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: processing-pine-smoking. Types: type-black-tea.
- Observed, cause unsettled
The sandalwood character of aged sheng is consistently reported and not explained. Recorded as observed.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
Processing: process-ageing. Types: type-dark-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Wood (Aroma) — The band that runs from green stem to old dry timber — and one of the words on the standard defect list that is usually not a defect here.
The phrases this covers
Editors write tasting notes in their own words. These are the exact phrases in the catalogue that this descriptor accounts for — the mapping is authored phrase by phrase, so nothing is grouped by a rule that guessed.
cedar · cypress · pine · pine resin · resin · sandalwood
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Keemun
- Keemun Hao Ya
- Lao Cong Shui Xian
- Moonlight White
- Nuwara Eliya
- Shan Lin Xi
- Taiwan Shan Cha
- Tanyang Gongfu
- Ye Sheng black tea
- Yu Hua Cha
- Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong (unsmoked)
- Zheng Yan yancha
Nearby
A tasting note is a comparison, not a measurement. Where the route from leaf to sensation is established it is labelled as such above; where it is not, the page says so rather than supplying a mechanism the descriptor has not earned. See the rest of the vocabulary for how the axes divide up.